OpenResty vs Unicorn

Overview

Unicorn

Stacks479

Followers401

Votes295

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks269

OpenResty

Stacks2.3K

Followers227

Votes0

OpenResty vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

Architecture: OpenResty is built on top of Nginx with additional features and modules, while Unicorn is a standalone HTTP server designed specifically for Rack applications. OpenResty offers a highly scalable and high-performance platform, capable of handling a large number of concurrent requests efficiently. On the other hand, Unicorn is lightweight and optimized for serving Ruby applications with the Rack interface.
Support for Lua: OpenResty has built-in support for Lua scripting language, allowing developers to extend Nginx functionalities and write complex business logic directly in Lua scripts. This feature enables advanced customization and flexibility in handling HTTP requests and responses. In contrast, Unicorn does not natively support Lua scripting, making it less versatile compared to OpenResty in terms of scripting capabilities.
Ease of Configuration: OpenResty provides a rich set of pre-built modules, making it easier to configure and customize various aspects of the web server. Its flexible configuration options and dynamic module loading simplify the setup process for developers. On the other hand, Unicorn has a simpler configuration setup focused on serving Ruby applications with minimal configuration overhead.
Scalability: OpenResty is known for its excellent scalability and performance optimization, making it suitable for high-traffic websites and applications. With features like asynchronous I/O and multi-threading capabilities, OpenResty can efficiently handle a large number of requests concurrently. In comparison, Unicorn is more limited in scalability, as it relies on multiple instances to distribute the load across servers.
Community and Ecosystem: OpenResty has a vibrant and active community that continuously contributes new modules, extensions, and optimizations to enhance the platform's capabilities. This rich ecosystem provides developers with a wide range of tools and resources to build and manage complex web applications effectively. Unicorn, being more specialized for Ruby applications, has a smaller community focused on maintaining and improving the server for Ruby developers.
Usage and Applications: OpenResty is widely used in various industries for building high-performance web applications, APIs, and microservices that require advanced customization and optimization. Its ability to handle complex routing, load balancing, and caching makes it a preferred choice for organizations with demanding web infrastructure needs. On the other hand, Unicorn is primarily used in Ruby on Rails applications to serve HTTP requests and manage application processes efficiently within the Ruby framework.

In Summary, OpenResty and Unicorn differ in architecture, Lua support, configuration ease, scalability, community ecosystem, and usage applications.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Unicorn	OpenResty
Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.	OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx modules, as well as most of their external dependencies.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 1.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 269	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 479	Stacks 2.3K
Followers 401	Followers 227
Votes 295	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 81 Fast 59 Performance 36 Web server 30 Very light 30 Open Source Cons 4 Not multithreaded	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	NGINX

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, OpenResty?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Related Comparisons

OpenResty vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

Architecture: OpenResty is built on top of Nginx with additional features and modules, while Unicorn is a standalone HTTP server designed specifically for Rack applications. OpenResty offers a highly scalable and high-performance platform, capable of handling a large number of concurrent requests efficiently. On the other hand, Unicorn is lightweight and optimized for serving Ruby applications with the Rack interface.
Support for Lua: OpenResty has built-in support for Lua scripting language, allowing developers to extend Nginx functionalities and write complex business logic directly in Lua scripts. This feature enables advanced customization and flexibility in handling HTTP requests and responses. In contrast, Unicorn does not natively support Lua scripting, making it less versatile compared to OpenResty in terms of scripting capabilities.
Ease of Configuration: OpenResty provides a rich set of pre-built modules, making it easier to configure and customize various aspects of the web server. Its flexible configuration options and dynamic module loading simplify the setup process for developers. On the other hand, Unicorn has a simpler configuration setup focused on serving Ruby applications with minimal configuration overhead.
Scalability: OpenResty is known for its excellent scalability and performance optimization, making it suitable for high-traffic websites and applications. With features like asynchronous I/O and multi-threading capabilities, OpenResty can efficiently handle a large number of requests concurrently. In comparison, Unicorn is more limited in scalability, as it relies on multiple instances to distribute the load across servers.
Community and Ecosystem: OpenResty has a vibrant and active community that continuously contributes new modules, extensions, and optimizations to enhance the platform's capabilities. This rich ecosystem provides developers with a wide range of tools and resources to build and manage complex web applications effectively. Unicorn, being more specialized for Ruby applications, has a smaller community focused on maintaining and improving the server for Ruby developers.
Usage and Applications: OpenResty is widely used in various industries for building high-performance web applications, APIs, and microservices that require advanced customization and optimization. Its ability to handle complex routing, load balancing, and caching makes it a preferred choice for organizations with demanding web infrastructure needs. On the other hand, Unicorn is primarily used in Ruby on Rails applications to serve HTTP requests and manage application processes efficiently within the Ruby framework.

In Summary, OpenResty and Unicorn differ in architecture, Lua support, configuration ease, scalability, community ecosystem, and usage applications.

OpenResty vs Unicorn

Overview